I believe this, as I have also been hanging out in the Reddits and [H]ardOCP's forums, and people who are receiving these cards and are upgrading from a 970 or better equivalent have mostly thus far been very underwhelmed by the performance of NVidia's latest overpriced offerings.

If you have friends thinking about upgrading, you might want to collect some of these threads for yourself to give to them, and steer them towards the better bargain with Polaris .

Have you seen whats happening on eBay with the fake 960s? Since the 1080 and 1070 launched, the prices for 960s started dropping. So some people grabbed old 560s and modded the bios to make them look like the 960s and discount them super low, except one problem, shader units can't be modded and CPU-Z picks up on the real number. Shows a fake 960 with 300 something units versus the real 960 at 1024. Hilarious.

It's an AIB partner issue not NVidia/AMD one. It's come up due to the 1080/1070 being the heavily reviewed sample du jour. Other publications have shown the issue affects AMD cards as well.

Asus & MSI sending cards with a BIOS that allows the card to work in OC Mode straight away without requiring use of OC software, all to try to get their card higher up the comparison chart if the reviewer doesn't do their job properly, in the hopes of snagging more sales. There's nothing holding the cards back form hitting these speeds if you bother to tinker. The issue is a large proportion of users don't bother & will be end up with a card that doesn't match what the reviewer showed.

The take away from this is make sure you look at who you trust for reviews.